


June, 2017

by gunsandships



Series: What Was and Wasn't [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-07 00:27:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11612127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gunsandships/pseuds/gunsandships
Summary: Angelica and Peggy clean out Eliza's stuff. Angelica finds something interesting.





	June, 2017

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry about killing Eliza. Please leave constructive criticism in the comments!

Angelica opened her window, relieved to be met with a cool breeze. It seemed to alleviate the thick air and the smell of old cardboard and mold. They had spent all morning like this, she and Peggy, hauling boxes from the basement of their childhood home into the living room, sorting through more than three decades’ worth of memories and dividing them into piles. 

Peggy, sitting on her knees on the carpet, surrounded by stacks of paper and photo albums, spoke for the first time in hours. “Hey, Angie, look at this.” She held up a photograph of their family of five, standing in front of a carousel at what looked like some sort of fair, all of them sporting broad grins. “I remember this day.” 

Peggy couldn’t have been a day older than five and a half in the photograph, and she was holding their father’s hand, flashing a smile at least four teeth short of a full set at the invisible photographer. Angelica smiled fondly at the memory: it had been a cloudy day, but little Eliza had insisted on wearing her best frilly sundress. The picture had been taken minutes before the sky turned the color of coal and spewed both rain and hail over Albany, turning Peggy’s toothless grin into the face of true despair only a five-year-old could produce. They had spent the next several hours inside a fish and chips joint, waiting for the weather to calm, Eliza dipping everything – including various parts of her dress – in ketchup. 

“Is there a date on the back?” Angelica asked, putting the album in her own hands down on the coffee table. 

Peggy nodded, reading the inscription in their mother’s handwriting aloud. “L-R: Mommy, Angelica, Margarita, Daddy, Elizabeth. October 22nd, 1989. So we would have been…” She started counting on her fingers.

“Five, six and seven, yeah,” said Angelica. “Almost twenty-eight years ago.”

“It feels like another lifetime, if I’m being honest,” Peggy admitted, tracing their sister’s outline with her finger. “Look at mom. She looked so much like her.” 

They both went quiet, Angelica bending over at an uncomfortable angle to get a proper look. Their reactions to seeing their mother so closely resembling an adult Eliza were as different as they themselves were. Angelica felt her heart warm and was tempted to call their mother down from upstairs, where she was sewing – meanwhile, Peggy was suddenly overcome with longing. Her hand began to tremble. 

Angelica reached her hand out to pat her sister’s knee, but retracted it awkwardly when she realized said knee was too covered in old books, cinema tickets and letters to reach without running the very probable risk of ripping something fragile. 

“It’s so unfair,” Peggy stated, tone small and defeated. “I miss her.”

“I know, Peggy,” said Angelica, trying her best to sound comforting. “I know. I miss her too.” She wiped Peggy’s freshly sprung tears from her cheeks with her thumb and cupped her face in her hands. “Hey. Let’s take a break from this, yeah? Go get lunch or something.”

Peggy closed her eyes in an effort to stop any more tears from running down her face, appreciative of her sister’s touch. “Yeah. It feels weirdly gross to eat in here now.”

Angelica got to her feet, stretching her arms out behind her back. Her elbows made a popping sound that made Peggy cringe. She helped her get up, making sure not to let her trip and break anything as she guided her away from the mess scattered on the floor. “My legs feel like when the TV doesn’t have a signal,” Peggy chuckled and dried the last of her tears with the back of her hand. “I think I’ve been sitting on them for too long.” 

They each picked up a box labeled _GARBAGE_ on their way out. Throwing Eliza’s stuff away, even if it was just old Lego and empty perfume bottles from the nineties, felt simultaneously like taking off a heavy backpack and swearing in church. 

Sitting in Angelica’s car, Peggy looked up at the Schuyler mansion as they were driving away from it. It was the first time they were there in a little over a year – they hadn’t wanted to expose themselves to such an avalanche of memories of their dead sister yet, not when just walking past her apartment on their way to work still hadn’t stopped making their chests constrict with actual, physical pain, even several months after the fact. Now that their parents had decided to sell it – because they, too, had issues feeling at peace in it without Eliza in the world, Peggy suspected – the two remaining Schuyler sisters had had to face it prematurely, sorting out Eliza’s old belongings as well as their own. 

They were throwing most of it away. Eliza had always been fiercely independent and had taken everything of importance with her when she flew the nest, so the majority of the things left behind were childhood mementos, books, and toys she had wanted to save for her own children. 

Peggy, more sentimentally attached to inanimate objects than Angelica, had already lugged three cardboard boxes of Eliza’s clothes into her car. They smelled more of basement now than anything, but there were some beautiful dresses there that they hadn’t been able to bear to throw away, and Peggy still had her sister’s memory fresh enough in mind to imagine her scent woven into the garments. 

Angelica had been quick to take her notebooks. Even though Eliza was dead, she didn’t feel dead _enough_ to make Angelica want to peek inside them; it was tempting, as she longed to hear her sister’s voice in her head again and trace her handwriting with her fingers, to read something she had written when she was alive – but at the very same time, Angelica knew that Eliza would have written deeply personal paragraphs, words no one else was meant to read. To open the notebooks would feel too much like an invasion of privacy for the temporary, self-indulgent satisfaction to be worth it. If the dead didn’t deserve privacy, who did? 

She had taken them for safekeeping. She had a strong inkling that if she hadn’t brought the books home with her, their father wouldn’t think twice about flipping through them when he missed Eliza, and she didn’t want her sister’s memory in any way tarnished in his eyes, which had never held anything but adoration for her. She shuddered to think how he would react should he accidentally stumble upon a vivid recollection of a sexual encounter penned by a fifteen-year-old Eliza, or perhaps – a thousand times worse – an _adult_ Eliza. 

The thought made her chuckle, and Peggy, in the passenger seat, turned to face her in confusion. “What’s funny?”

“Just imagining dad finding Eliza’s mid-puberty journal entries.”

Peggy snorted. “I did that once. I was about twelve. It was all about how this boy André – remember him? – asked her about her bra size, and she hadn’t yet started wearing a bra, so she had no idea how they were sized, and she just answered “medium”, and they all laughed at her. She was _mortified_. She walked in on me reading it and almost broke my arm trying to pry it away from me.”

The atmosphere in the car felt considerably lighter now. 

Several hours later, Angelica sat down in the wicker chair on her porch with Eliza’s boxes and a glass of wine, having finished sorting through everyone’s belongings at the mansion. She splayed all seventeen notebooks onto the table beside her, wanting not to open them, but to sort them into chronological order and find a place for them on her bookshelves, along with the other books Eliza had given her as birthday and Christmas presents over the years. They were all labeled: _“ELIZABETH SCHUYLER 8TH GRADE FRENCH”, “Eliza’s top-secret super cool diary (MOM KEEP OUT)”, “Journal 1998-1999”, “Liz and Peggy’s story book”, “Eliza Schuyler, 12th grade English”_. The titles made her smile, many of them in the chicken scratches of an eleven- or twelve-year-old Eliza; a few in the slanted, elegant handwriting she’d had as an adult. 

After sorting the notebooks into what she thought was a probable chronological order based on titles, handwriting, and number of doodles on the covers, she picked them all up and made to stand up – and then promptly sat back down as something fell out of one of the older ones. It was a folded piece of paper – yellowed, but not nearly as yellowed as the book it had fallen out of, so it must have been put there in recent years. She could make out a handwriting she didn’t recognize. Putting the books back down on the table, Angelica felt guilt wash over her as she carefully unfolded the lined sheet of paper – yet, somehow, what she was about to do felt justifiable. Reading what someone else had written didn’t feel like as much of an intrusion as opening her sister’s own notebooks would. Curiosity got the best of her, and she started reading.

_August 9th, 2010_

_My dear Eliza,  
The happiest of all birthdays to you. I regret that the circumstances of our relationship forbid me to spend it with you and your family. I hope we will have an opportunity to celebrate in our own way upon your return from Albany. My prayers that your weekend is everything you wish it to be. Happy 27th, my greatest desire, I am forever yours,_

_Alexander_

_P.S. I know you’re laughing at my flowery language as you read this. It’s intentional. I’m showing off. I miss you so much already, which is strange, because you’re literally right there, naked and asleep in my bed, as I’m writing this. I’m gonna go put this in your jean pocket and then wake you up now. I hope you think of what we're about to do when your husband tries to please you tonight._

Angelica traced the signature with her fingertip. “I knew it,” she muttered smugly, folding the paper neatly and placing it back where it had been hidden for the last seven years, the corners of her mouth tugging upwards. “Elizabeth Schuyler, you little sneak.”


End file.
